Barbara Hall bio forthcoming.

He Speaks in Your Voice (May-ish, 2011. Issue 28.)

He speaks in your voice, pressing his ears against the door. Becoming a thing in the world, without heat or light. A mollifying fuzz carrying the sensation of an object deep into the blue room. This is a sound you taste, a sequence of pulses through the tenor of weedy indoor gardens. A boy with a name long since forgotten. You sense the byshadows where he presses his fingers, soft in discourse, waiting to be overwhelmed.

This is the year of fog, tower shots and air bursts. You follow the voice through a tunnel as they make their way through the windows, a chewed up sprawl of fake grass, and out the back door. There is no one in here or out there or wherever you are. The pulse rumbles as it gathers in some space beyond space, and there is nothing else.

This is a place you could scarcely recall if not for the pictures. A distant memory to yourself. The noise is carried end to end, ear to ear, back into the world. A shell with its sound locked inside. These are the words that come back to you as you push your bike back through the snow. Watching for the flicker of heat between you.

You'll smell something bitter, a pale scent where you have trouble breathing. This is a quickening, not in your heart so much as your legs, a last look around before you bolt and he after you, across Motomachi.

You are in the field the night they cross the river, watching them light up the stalks with hundreds of matches. When the tank bursts you search the bank until there is nowhere to turn but back. Into the street you go, nothing but the sense that you are moving. The air quivers with flesh and breath, collecting in its flight fragments of song with no meaning, some small coiled chill of body and object. You begin to hear it. A soft-bodied mood. A world hum. Echo makers, crackling through faces shedding their fabric.

You watch them through the bathroom window, cutting through the Yamashitas' farm. This is the shortest distance between, through the plastic eggs and flurries.

The children march on the other end, remnants of something you begin to imagine you understand. A sound not naked, but losing itself as they forget their own words.

He follows, holding his father's fedora. This is not the boy you remember. Fragments of meaning snatched from the hum of wind through his coat sleeves, a wind tossing his hair in wild waves until he is nothing but hair and disappears behind the trees. A neon light falls against a waxy W, pumping a flicker of heat into your chest.

The youngest ones hurl this way and that, turning their wheels in the grass to the rhythm of their brown feet through the hedge, through the wall.

You study him from a distance, from a night long past. A head bobbing from a white streak. Rising and falling to the little boat he had. Lost before he could recall. He speaks from a far-off place, losing her eyes to the blue milken dreaminess, sputtering and shuddering, blowing beneath your hand.

A sheet of bodies weaves behind you, waning outside the crossing.

He moans into the glare, a sound that turns your hair white. Pockets of wind seeping from lips to throat. Rattling the web of light as it jerks a line of darkness across the bottom of the horizon.

The great bulk on the boy's knees shifts, unable to remember standing. He slides, quietly on his side, watching the sky.

That night you dream you bear the his child. A dark girl with honeyed hair. Eyes flying under your hands. Impossible. You watch her from a far-off place, unwrapping the sound from a coffin of light and utter silence. This is late September. Steam blanches the glass and you wake to sun burning the window shades of blue and red. The boy stands on one foot at the tree, waiting for God. Snapping the grapes as twigs. He tips the bottle when you close your eyes, filling you with water.

Hear the footfalls at dawn, drifting towards the eyelid of the moon. You don't think you're moving. Out over the open street, a voice drifting underneath, hanging you up in bone brown. A rivet unburdened by memory and sight, whistling high above the damp fields, wwallowing a flock of roils and dips.

He holds his hand up to the light, turning it. Laughing as it metamorphoses before your eyes. His face becomes a face, the hollows, eyes staring past you, into the walls. When he reaches the street, the skin is nearly dry.

You find the hole and push on through, catching their sound on the far end of nowhere. Groping the wood through a wave of amber, a cloud sifting through the garden wall. There is only the plane, coming to make sure you don't lose your way.

He tells you a story, something he's heard in a book and trails off halfway, burying his face. He talks of what it's like to disappear, speaking to you from below as you press your ear to the wood, the vibrations of the girl in a dress and drums, a hundred feet dancing bare in a tilted rhythm.

He makes his way over the patio banister, an orphan turning in slow motion. Arms filter up, losing their shape in silhouette as he stares at the house you once thought about, before you knew it was there, placed in your dreaming. What could only be dreamed. This is nothing. Less than nothing.

You chase his sneaker prints through an inflated blush of lamplight. A shell of sound through an iron lung. Finding him through a patch of oleander, on the ground with his hands around his shoes.

The fields have grown over, curling around:salt and water as the curtain sucks your moan and painted wings. In black sheets of rain you study the last of fires long forgotten, watching his father's house through the embers of something you used to know.

The doors open as Chinese boxes, revealing the semicircles of trees just beyond and he looks up and says what you've thought from the beginning.

I know it's here.

The boy leaves his shoes behind and presses his face to the glass. Breathless. His words come in odd, calm fragments, working out the meaning in the center. Somewhere a violin plays, swirling away as the hour closes down, a mocking sound bled through the clouds.

You prepare your laughter before the silence, the sound of unraveling, a slow dullish tumble stirring wistful and unchanged.